eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

November 2012

11/24/2012

Theodore
and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom by
Andrew Napolitano REVIEW

Time is in short supply these days and
so this blog review begs your forgiveness for its rather uncharacteristic
brevity.

Judge Andrew Napolitano has orchestrated
a Presidential biographical assassination in the name of ideology here. As with
Shakespeare’s Brutus and Julius Cesar, the reader will have to decide if the
fatal wounds are all deserved. If you have grown up in an American school, you
have generally been given a positive impression of the Progressive movement.
After all, who would call something "Progressive" if it did not lead to things
getting better, right? We generally think of the Progressive Movement (when we
think of it at all) in terms like the following.

Before the
Progressive Movement people were eating rat bones in their hash. But after the Progressive Movement the Food and Drug Act saved us from certain
food poisoning.

Before the
Progressive Movement employers made you work for 16 hour days seven days a week
for a nickel an hour. But after the Progressive Movement we all found ourselves working at a livable
wage.

Before the
Progressive Movement you had to send your kids out to the coal mines to pay
your rent. But after the Progressive Movement your kids were given a mandatory free education
until they graduated.

Before the
Progressive Movement Senators were chosen in the smoke-filled back rooms of
corporate headquarters. But after the Progressive Movement Senators were chosen by the well informed civilians
who Senators then went on to serve.

Before the
Progressive Movement lumber and mining companies ravaged the landscapes at will
in a massive dollar-godded beauty-for-cash mill. But after the Progressive Movement millions of acres of Federal wilderness and
parklands were spared for the nations unwashed masses to enjoy.

Before the
Progressive Movement politicians bathed in demon rum and wrung fortunes from the
brows of millions of alcohol widows and orphans. But after the Progressive Movement a nation of tee-totalling Baptists served
lemon-aid to a new utopia.

Before the
Progressive Movement Trusts and cartels had their way with workers and their
pathetic unions. But after the Progressive Movement a business owner had Uncle Sam to answer to
if he did not take his hat off to labor.

Before the
Progressive Movement women were chattel and their voice was irrelevant. But after the Progressive Movement women could vote and their voices purified
the waters of American political life for good.

Before the
Progressive Movement the world was a breeding ground of imperialist intrigue
and aggression. But after the Progressive Movement the world was made safe for democracy.

Before the
Progressive Movement darkness.
But after the Progressive Movement light.

Judge Napolitano disabuses you of this
notion (or attempts to). He has made no
attempt to hide why; Because if we allow ourselves to believe that people who
disregarded the Constitution to solve problems for our grandparents - problems that the Constitution
never gave to the government to solve, then we will be inclined to look at our
present governments and, rather than expecting them to defend the Constitution,
expect them to ignore it on our behalf in a likewise manner. That is what
this is all about. Our heroes will become those who did not care about it. It is about Executive, Legislative, and Judicial “over-reach”
and the dangers of getting off our Constitutional gold standard.

In the course of his indictment, Napolitano
charges President Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson with egoism and hubris.
He asserts that though they may have campaigned and governed under a flag of
liberation (usually portrayed as a liberation of the masses from large
corporations), they also took away freedoms from people and deposited control
into the hands of Federal and State beurocracies. Progressivism did not free
people to make their own decisions so much as transfer them from one form of
exploitation and control to another. One might summarize it this way.

Before
Progressivism, people were not free to make fair contracts with their
capitalist employers. But after Progressivism the government did not give them the freedom to make their
own

Before
Progressivism people were subjected to somewhat unhealthy doses of corporate
malfeasance. But after Progressivism people were subjected to lethal doses of regulatory malfeasance.

Before
Progressivism you had to send your child off to work instead of school. But after Progressivism you had to send your child off to a school that educated
them to play the role that the Progressive educational philosophers deemed to
be their destiny.

Before
Progressivism, those with slight advantages made the rules in such a way that
they could be rewarded exponentially for those slight advantages. But after Progressivism those with slight disadvantages could be rewarded
exponentially for maintaining and not overcoming those disadvantages, indeed there would be greater advantages for making oneself more needy rather than less.

Before
Progressivism State legislators elected Senators so that they could guard
Federal encroachments upon their State sovereignty. But after Progressivism the Federal Government could ignore State sovereignty
at will.

Before
Progressivism the Federal government had no power to make States do much of
anything that the Constitution did not expressly give them authority to. But after Progressivism, the Federal income tax power granted the Federal
government unlimited economic power to coerce States into doing anything they
wanted.

Before
Progressivism Americans contented themselves with the goal of being the world’s
“City Set Upon a Hill.” But after Progressivism, America was somehow obligated to step in and make the
rest of the world America.

Before
Progressivism land could be used wisely by people with vested interests in its
reasonable use. But after Progressivism, people in Washington with degrees in forest management
could let a timber lot turn into a tinderbox for the sake of an endangered Darter
Snail.

Before
Progressivism you could eat and drink your way to your own personal happiness. But after Progressivism, you had a tax-payer funded army dedicated to depriving
you of a cold beer.

Before
Progressivism you paid for it if you did not responsibly fight for your rights as
an American. But after Progressivism you sued the Government if it did not bring you
breakfast in bed.

Before
Progressivism, freedom with necessary struggle
But after Progressivism, dependency with inevitable loss of character.

These are just some of the
counter-arguments that Andrew Napolitano levels against the culprits who grace
his book’s title. For him, these Presidents played fast and loose with the
Federal Constitution, asserting, in a somewhat Hamiltonian way, that average
people could not be trusted to pursue their own happiness well if allowed to
pursue it too freely- too “Constitutionally.”

In 1911, Elihu Root (Secretary of War/State and a U.S. Senator) wrote a
counter argument to the Progressives entitled Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution. I
suspect that Judge Andrew Napolitano would endorse a good deal of the message
that he conveyed there. The following paragraphs in particular.

“A third consideration is that it is not merely
useless but injurious for government to attempt too much. It is manifest that
to enable it to deal with the new conditions I have described we must invest
government with authority to interfere with the individual conduct of the
citizen to a degree hitherto unknown in this country. When government
undertakes to give the individual citizen protection by regulating the conduct
of others towards him in the field where formerly he protected himself by his
freedom of contract, it is limiting the liberty of the citizen whose conduct is
regulated and taking a step in the direction of paternal government. While the
new conditions of industrial life make it plainly necessary that many such
steps shall be taken, they should be taken only so far as they are necessary
and are effective. Interference with individual liberty by government should be
jealously watched and restrained, because the habit of undue interference
destroys that independence of character without which in its citizens no free
government can endure.

We should not forget that while institutions
receive their form from national character they have a powerful reflex
influence upon that character. Just so far as a nation allows its institutions
to be moulded by its weaknesses of character rather than by its strength it
creates an influence to increase weakness at the expense of strength.

The habit of undue interference by government in
private affairs breeds the habit of undue reliance upon government in private
affairs at the expense of individual initiative, energy, enterprise, courage,
independent manhood.

The strength of self-government and the motive
power of progress must be found in the characters of the individual citizens
who make up a nation. Weaken individual character among a people by comfortable
reliance upon paternal government and a nation soon becomes incapable of free
self-government and fit only to be governed: the higher and nobler qualities of
national life that make for ideals and effort and achievement become atrophied
and the nation is decadent.”

Question for Comment: What do you think?
Has the help that Government has given to you in your times of need – or the
supports that it gives you in the pursuit of your aspirations – made you soft? Dependent?
Lazy? Does its paternalistic oversight retard your creativity? Your initiative?
Your freedom to do as you see fit in the pursuit of your own and your family’s
best interest?

In my own humble opinion. any government can be either bad or good depending on the character of the governed. I think Calvin Coolidge might have been our greatest President if America had been the greatest people. PErhpas the saying remains always true: "No clever arangement of bad eggs ever makes a good omelet."

11/03/2012

In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development by
Carol Gilligan REVIEW

Two decades ago, Carol Gilligan published In a Different Voice to highlight the
problems that result when men study men to understand humans. In a Different Voice
set out to study women – or more precisely, to listen to women - maybe even to relate to women who were
listened to – to better understand the subject of ethics from a feminist
critical perspective.

I am going to try and boil her primary arguments down to a
few propositions (what a male thing to do) because she spends a lot of time in
this book “just talking” with women (imagine!).

Proposition One: First,
she makes the argument that for too long women’s voices have not been heard in
the public square because long after they were no longer banned from being
there, they have been self-imposing silence on themselves or, maybe worse,
offering to “ventriloquize their voices” – to be used as puppets to male
ventriloquists who make compliance as such mandatory for acceptance in “the
club.” “Women often sensed that it was dangerous to say or even to know what
they wanted or thought upsetting to others” she writes. She criticizes conclusions
drawn from studies which are not truly open to women saying what is on their
hearts rather than what they might be expected to say. “Implicitly adopting the
male life as the norm, they have tried to fashion women out of a masculine
cloth” she charges. “I saw that by maintaining these ways of seeing and
speaking about human lives,” Gilligan notes, “men were leaving out women, but
women were leaving out themselves.”

“The differences between women and
men which I describe center on a tendency for women and men to make different
relational errors-for men to think that if they know themselves, following
Socrates' dictum, they will also know women, and for women to think that if
only they know others, they will come to know themselves. Thus men and women
tacitly collude in not voicing women's experiences and build relationships
around a silence that is maintained by men's not knowing their disconnection
from women and women's not knowing their dissociation from themselves. Much
talk about relationships and about love carefully conceals these truths.”

Her point is that girls (at least in the 1990’s when she
wrote this book) were still being taught to ignore themselves and to use words
to hide themselves and disguise themselves rather than to reveal themselves. “While
our research provided evidence of girls' resistance to dissociation,” she
writes,

“it also documented the initiation
of girls into the psychological divisions that are familiar to many women: the
coming not to know what one knows, the difficulty in hearing or listening to
one's voice, the disconnection between mind and body, thoughts and feelings,
and the use of one's voice to cover rather than to convey one's inner world,”

“The difficulty women experience in
finding or speaking publicly in their own voices emerges repeatedly in the form
of qualification and self-doubt, but also in intimations of a divided judgment,
a public assessment and private assessment which are fundamentally at odds.”

“Sensitivity to the needs of others
and the assumption of responsibility for taking care lead women to attend to
voices other than their own and to include in their judgment other points of
view.”

Gilligan’s purpose in writing the book then was to “expand
the understanding of human development by using the group left out in the
construction of theory to call attention to what is missing in its account.”

So, what do women say about moral development when they are
given this opportunity to speak “off the record/on the record”? Carol Gilligan
proposes that what they say challenges the notion that she was taught in
graduate school, namely that males are more likely to develop “higher” levels
of moral thought because they are capable of greater feats of abstract logic.
(It should be noted that even feminists will criticize Gilligan for accepting
premises that they argue are not based in reality).

Proposition Two: Women
evaluate right and wrong by asking themselves “How will this act or behavior affect
the quality of attachments that exist between the actual people involved?” whereas
men typically evaluate right and wrong by evaluating their decisions up against
some abstract ethical concept like “rights” or “justice.” One might argue that
women more typically use the “ethics of care” as a primary compass in
navigating life’s ethical dilemmas while men more often refer to an ethics of “principle.”

“Thus women not only define
themselves in a context of human relationship but also judge themselves in
terms of their ability to care. Women’s place in man’s life cycle has been that
of nurturer, caretaker, and helpmate, the weaver of those networks of
relationships on which she in turn relies. But while women have thus taken care
of men, men have, in their theories of psychological development, as in their
economic arrangements, tended to assume or devalue that care.”

Gilligan is specifically critiquing the work of Kohlberg who
constructed the following chart to explain all how all humans should develop over
the course of their life cycle.

“Tying moral development in
adolescence to the growth of reflective thought at that time, Kohlberg terms
these three views of morality preconventional, conventional, and
postconventional, to reflect the expansion in moral understanding from an
individual to a societal to a universal point of view.”

Here is what Gilligan has to say about this:

“Kohlberg's (1958, 1981) six stages
that describe the development of moral judgment from childhood to adulthood are
based empirically on a study of eighty-four boys whose development Kohlberg has
followed for a period of over twenty years. Although Kohlberg claims
universality for his stage sequence, those groups not included in his original
sample rarely reach his higher stages (Edwards, 1975; Holstein, 1976; Simpson,
1974). Prominent among those who thus appear to be deficient in moral
development when measured by Kohlberg's scale are women, whose judgments seem
to exemplify the third stage of his six-stage sequence. At this stage morality
is conceived in interpersonal terms and goodness is equated with helping and
pleasing others. This conception of goodness is considered by Kohlberg and
Kramer (1969) to be functional in the lives of mature women insofar as their
lives take place in the home. Kohlberg and Kramer imply that only if women
enter the traditional arena of male activity will they recognize the inadequacy
of this moral perspective and progress like men toward higher stages where
relationships are subordinated to rules (stage four) and rules to universal
principles of justice (stages five and six). Yet herein lies a paradox, for the
very traits that traditionally have defined the "goodness" of women,
their care for and sensitivity to the needs of others, are those that mark them
as deficient in moral development.

Gilligan seems to argue that men more typically separate
themselves from relationships to make “better” decisions while women connect
themselves to do the same. Indeed, she goes on to argue that men may experience
intimacy as a “threat” to them and
their ability to make good decisions while women will experience isolation in a similar light.

“Since masculinity is defined
through separation while femininity is defined through attachment, male gender
identity is threatened by intimacy while female gender identity is threatened
by separation. Thus males tend to have difficulty with relationships, while
females tend to have problems with individuation.”

“The danger men describe in their
stories of intimacy is a danger of entrapment or betrayal, being caught in a
smothering relationship or humiliated by rejection and deceit. In contrast, the
danger women portray in their tales of achievement is a danger of isolation, a
fear that in standing out or being set apart by success, they will be left
alone.”

Thus, men typically see the world as a staff line chart,
illustrating where everyone is in a hierarchy - and they fear being on the
bottom of it. They hope to be at the top of it. Women, to the contrary, see the
world as a web and fear being on the outskirts or banished from it. They hope
to be at the center of it. Stereotype? Let the reader look at their own lives
and relationships I guess. She does cite an interesting study in which men and
women are asked to evaluate the stories behind a series of pictures that they
see. She notes that for men, the stories they tell of the pictures get scarier
as the pictures portray people closer
together while it is just the opposite for women. “As people are brought
closer together in the pictures,” Gilligan writes,

“the images of violence in the
men's stories increase, while as people are set further apart, the violence in
the women's stories increases. The women in the class projected violence most
frequently into the picture of the man at his desk (the only picture portraying
a person alone), while the men in the class most often saw violence in the
scene of the acrobats on the trapeze (the only picture in which people
touched). Thus, it appears that men and women may experience attachment and
separation in different ways and that each sex perceives a danger which the
other does not see-men in connection, women in separation.”

It only stands to reason that men are going to be more
willing to make decisions that risk rupturing relationships than women are and
that one of those decisions is simply to say what they think out loud.

Proposition Three:
That men more typically define themselves by what they achieve and women by who
they are connected to. For this reason, women are more reticent to risk
damaging a web of relations by pursuing an abstract principle then men are. For
Gilligan, this is the problem with defining morality from purely male eyes. She
does not wish to replace masculine ideas of morality but simply to balance
them. She does not wish to overwrite
women’s voices on top of men’s but to hear them in stereo. Her beef with
Kohlberg is that he sees what men typically do when they think about ethics as “beyond”
what women typically do rather than something that they do in parallel. In Snow
White, the heroine awakes not to conquer the world but to marry a prince. It is
how she connects that makes her a heroine. Her identity is “interpersonally
defined.”

“While for men, identity precedes
intimacy and generativity in the optimal cycle of human separation and
attachment, for women these tasks seem instead to be fused. Intimacy goes along
with identity, as the female comes to know herself as she is known, through her
relationships with others.”

Gilligan uses the games that girls and boys play and how
they play them to illustrate.

“Traditional girls' games like jump
rope and hopscotch are turn-taking games, where competition is indirect since
one person's success does not necessarily signify another's failure.
Consequently, disputes requiring adjudication are less likely to occur. In
fact, most of the girls whom Lever interviewed claimed that when a quarrel
broke out, they ended the game. Rather than elaborating a system of rules for
resolving disputes, girls subordinated the continuation of the game to the
continuation of relationships.”

Boys, it appears, would rather finish a game they started as
friends being enemies than not finish the game. Winning takes precedent over relationship.
Being right. Executing a fair sentence are what matters. “The blind willingness
to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics
abstacted from life,” writes Carol Gilligan,

“This willingness links Gandhi to
the biblical Abraham, who prepared to sacrifice the life of his son in order to
demonstrate the integrity and supremacy of his faith. Both men, in the
limitations of their fatherhood, stand in implicit contrast to the woman who
comes before Solomon and verifies her motherhood by relinquishing truth in
order to save the life of her child. It is the ethics of an adulthood that has
become principled at the expense of care that Erikson comes to criticize in his
assessment of Gandhi's life.”

“Thus the logic underlying an ethic
of care is a psychological logic of relationships which contrasts with the
formal logic of fairness that informs the justice approach.”

Question for Comment:
When you think about the great moral dilemmas of your life, do you find that
their difficulty lies in how they force you to abandon or hurt one relationship
at the expense of another? Or do you find that the difficulty arises from pitting
one abstract principle against another? Do you make ethical decisions as a man
or as a woman? Or do you make them in some way that you think all other humans,
regardless of gender, should make them?